This disclosure relates to a mixer for producing and solidifying an alloy in a subterranean reservoir environment, including hydrocarbon oil and gas wells, geothermal wells, gas sequestration wells, waste disposal wells, mining pit holes, or the like.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present techniques, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as an admission of any kind.
Seals, especially elastomeric seals are used in a variety of downhole tools, tool strings, and applications for subterranean exploration, production, injection, and sequestration. Seals are broadly intended to block fluid flow in certain areas or elements of tools, thereby directly enabling control of well operations, thus choking, blocking, or preventing fluid flow to certain zones of a subterranean reservoir. Due to exposure to uncontrolled environmental fluids, the seals in subterranean reservoir environments may experience corrosive conditions that lead to gradual losses of their performance, or possibly failure, over time. In a subterranean reservoir environment, seals are most typically employed to hydraulically isolate an inner surface of the wellbore from an outer surface of the wellbore or, alternatively, to isolate subterranean reservoirs from one another, such as during zonal isolation applications. In typical use cases, as may be appreciated, elastomeric seals may have one or several deficiencies. For example, the elastomeric seals may be subject to corrosion or chemical degradation (e.g.) by subterranean reservoir fluids. Because the elastomeric seals may be customized in specific sizes for each application, including various bore diameters, the elastomeric seals may be expensive to produce and/or may inconveniently introduce non-productive time if the elastomeric seals are not immediately available to well sites. Moreover, “chemically responsive” elastomeric seals, as typically found in completion swell packers, may take considerable time to achieve a structurally sound operating state or may improperly swell and improperly isolate the flow of an undesirable fluid. Low-cost and common elastomeric seals, such as seals made of nitriles (NBR) and hydrogenated nitriles (HNBR), are well-known to be subject to rapid chemical degradation in sour environments (i.e., environments having sour gas, H2S). Other low-cost and common elastomeric seals such as of a fluoroelastomer type (FKM, also referred as Viton™) may experience less environmental compatibility issues with subterranean reservoir fluids, but are undesirably more prone to degradation by the high-pH completion brines that may be employed down a well. In some cases, the wellbore may have a small cross sectional area (e.g., choke along production tubing), thereby offering a challenge for elastomeric seals to maneuver pass the choke. It is also not uncommon for elastomeric seals to encounter rough and/or corroded surfaces such as open-hole geological formations or corroded cased hole steel surfaces, against which it may be particularly difficult to achieve high permanent sealing pressures. These constraints, among others, hinder the utilization and/or useful operating lives of elastomeric seals within the subterranean reservoir environments.